Mailing Lists

As an alternative to newsgroups, you can subscribe to mailing lists. Users on mailing lists automatically receive messages and articles sent to the lists. Mailing lists work much like a mail alias, broadcasting messages to all users on the list. Mailing lists were designed to serve small, specialized groups of people. Instead of posting articles for anyone to see, only those who subscribe receive them. Numerous mailing lists are available for Linux as well as other subjects. For example, at the www.gnome.org site, you can subscribe to any of several mailing lists on GNOME topics, such as [email protected], which deals with GNOME desktop themes. You can do the same at lists.kde.org for KDE topics. At www .liszt.com, you can search for mailing lists on various topics. By convention, to subscribe to a list, you send a request to the mailing list address with a -request term added to its username. For example, to subscribe to [email protected], you send a request to [email protected]. At www.linux.org, you can link to sites that support Linux-oriented mailing lists, such as the Red Hat mailing lists page and the Linux Mailing Lists Web site. Lists exist for such topics as the Linux kernel, administration, security, and different distributions. For example, linux-admin covers administration topics, and linux-apps discusses software applications; vger.kernel.org provides mailing list services for Linux kernel developers.

NOTE You can use the Mailman and Majordomo programs to automatically manage your mailing lists. Mailman is the GNU mailing list manager included with Fedora (www.list.org). You can find out more about Majordomo at www.greatcircle.com/majordomo, and about Mailman at sourceforge.net.